What cave paintings illuminate

The cave art near Montignac reminded me that in the grand scheme of things, I’m a total prima donna as an artist. I do appreciate a quiet room with a view, please, and the assurance no one will bother me for an hour or two, and a decent computer, and tea with honey. My fragile ego is hurt by rejections or simply being forgotten by the editors to whom I’ve applied for recognition. Other contemporary writers I know are even touchier and fussier. But those beautiful animations sponged onto limestone fourteen to seventeen thousand years ago? They required preparing candles by smearing reindeer fat on concave rocks and lighting juniper wicks (which smoke white). Minerals had to be ground to powder. Soft bits of hide could apply the paste of water and pigment, or lines of color blown through hollow bones–more prep work. Cro-Magnon artists studied the shape of the rocks, releasing bison or horses from the cave’s own curves, rather than imposing their own visions onto blank canvas. Then their grand museums fell into disuse, many of their paintings just silting away unless a layer of clay prevented seepage, as in Lascaux’s closed galleries. In those that survive, certain symbols may constitute signatures–of individuals, or of clans?–but no one can read them anymore. Oh, probably plenty of the artists were irritable and full of themselves, I’m sure, but what’s left of them is a spiritual submission to materials and landscape. There are no cave self-portraits like those in the Musée D’Orsay (or, ahem, in any blog). Hardly any anthropomorphic figures at all, and those deformed. Just beautifully evoked animals processing peacefully into the caves’ darkest reaches.

We are now in the second half of a family adventure in France. During the first week in Paris, we ate baguettes and sorbet and toured every museum we thought our thirteen-year-old could possibly tolerate (the poor kid felt the need to avert his head from every female nude, so he developed a semi-permanent crick in his neck). I gave a reading in the wonderful Poets Live series, meeting the poet-organizer Pansy Maurer-Alvarez and having great but too-brief conversations with two of the writers sharing the stage (really, one end of a medieval cellar under an Irish pub): the terrific poets Sabine Huynh and Jennifer K. Dick. My French translator (isn’t that phrase glamorous?), Jean Migrenne, made a drive of more than two hours to come and hear me, and I had the pleasure of speaking with him for a little span, too. The whole experience felt charmed. In the next few days, in addition to waiting on line at the Eiffel Tower etc., I also did some legwork and writing toward a critical project–more on that another time.

Then we put poetry aside for a bit for three days in the Dordogne, visiting the reproductions at Lascaux II and miraculously getting 4 of the 78 visitor spots per day allowed in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume–the last site of multicolored prehistoric cave paintings in the region still accessible to nonspecialists. The region’s food is amazing and we also spent an afternoon canoeing down la Vézère, so the weekend was perfect, really. Now we’re in Angoulême and I’m relaxing with the kids while Chris conducts research at the comic book museum. This is why I have time to write, being a prima donna who does not want to type after long days tromping through museums. Well, I do have a poem going about the cave paintings, but I’m doing much more note-dashing than actual writing during this leg of the trip. The children seem to be of the opinion that they deserve nutella crêpes every two hours, which cuts into my auroch-sketching time considerably.

See? Excuses, excuses, and I don’t have to grind up any ochre, even. Well, I’ll consider these weeks the equivalent of staring at herds and drawing hind-quarters with a stick in the sand. You have to stock your head with images, think things through, before you head into the cave, right? And even so, cave-painting is a mysterious business. No one really understands why people do it, or where the shadowy animals of their imagination may be heading.